Presentation delivered at Dubai Internet City's "Big Data - An Emerging Technology" Excellence Series on June 24, 2014.

1. Recipes for Unlocking
Value from Big Data
June 24, 2014
Fadi Yousuf, Managing Director

2. 2© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
About Me
• Founder and Managing Director of Axeldata
Systems
• Big Data Consulting and Solution Design
• 14+ years involved in designing data architectures
• Previous life at Sun, Cisco, Oracle, Google and F5
Networks
• Working with Hadoop since 2011
• Hobby of the month: World Cup 2014

3. 3© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
2013
4.4 ZB
2020
44 ZB
The Age of Big Data
Source: IDC The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the
Increasing Value of the Internet of Things, 2014
1 Zettabyte = 1 Trillion Gigabytes
OLTP ERP
CRM
Documents
Emails
Web Logs
Social Media
M2M
Sensor data
Geolocation
per year40%Growing

4. 4© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
Data as a Competitive Advantage
leader’s
gut
instincts
data driven
decision
making
Firms that adopted data-driven
decision making are about
5-6%
more productive and profitable than
their competitors
- MIT Center for Digital Business

5. 5© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
Are We Getting Value from Our Data?
Most firms estimate that they are only analyzing 12% of the data that
they already have, leaving 88% of it on the cutting-room floor.
The Forrester WaveTM: Big Data Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2014
Data Silos Analytics CapabilitiesValue of Data

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Problems cannot be solved by the same
level of intelligence that created them.
Albert Einstein

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Data Platforms Landscape 2014
• RDBMS
• NoSQL
• In-Memory
• Search
• Hadoop
• etc.

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Hadoop: The Platform for Big Data
An open-source software framework for storage and large-scale
processing of data-sets on clusters of commodity hardware.
- Wikipedia
Storage Area Network
Server
Comput
e
Data
Traditional
Computing

9. 9© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
Hadoop: The Platform for Big Data
An open-source software framework for storage and large-scale
processing of data-sets on clusters of commodity hardware.
- Wikipedia
Servers/Storag
e
Compute
Data
Servers/Storag
e
Hadoop
Computing

10. 10© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
From Data Silos to Data Hubs
Hadoop
Streaming Data
Structured Data
Unstructured Data
Marketing
Finance
Data
Science
IT

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Use the Right Tool for the Right Job
When to use?
• Affordable Storage/Compute
• Structured and Unstructured
Data
• Large scale data analysis
• Resilient auto scalability
When to use?
• Interactive reporting (<1 sec)
• Structured Data
• Multistep Transactions
• Interoperability
• Sampled data analysis
Hadoop Relational Databases

12. 12© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
What Questions are You Asking?
Known
Unknown
Questions
being asked
Questions not
being asked
Business
Intelligence
Data
Discovery

13. 13© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
Big Data Journey: Start Small and Evolve
IT Infrastructure &
Operations
Business Intelligence &
Data Warehousing
Line of Business &
Business Analysts
CEOs, CFOs & CSOs
(CxOs)
Time to Value
PotentialValue
Optimized
Infrastructure
New Business
Models
Advanced
Analytics
Operational
Excellence
Organizational Big
Data Capability

14. 14© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
Build Data Science Teams
Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at
statistics than any software engineer and better at
software engineering than any statistician.
Josh Wills – Director of Data Science, Cloudera
Source: Wikipedia
Can you have all those skills in
one person?

15. 15© 2014. Axeldata Systems FZ-LLC
Summary: Recipes for Unlocking Value
• Expand your technology repertoire
• Ask the right questions (and bigger ones)
• Adopt a data exploration mentality
• Start small and evolve quick
• Build data science teams

16. Hadoop and the Hadoop elephant logo
are trademarks of the Apache Software
Foundation. All other trademarks are
the property of their respective owners.
fadi@axeldata.com
www.axeldata.com